Jazz & Improvisation / All styles

2025 stock There is a distinguished tradition of solo bass albums on ECM, but Provenance is the first to be devoted to the electric bass guitar. Björn Meyer, Swedish-born and Swiss-based, has shaped a unique voice for his instrument inside the most diverse contexts, working alongside Persian harpist and singer Asita Hamidi, Swedish nyckelharpa player Johan Hedin, and Tunisian oud master Anouar Brahem. For a decade he was a member of Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin, in which his bass guitar was frequently th…

Newly designed packaging with original artwork. Comes in a hard box cover with a 12-page booklet. There exists a clear before and after Solo Concerts Bremen/Lausanne. On those evenings in March and July 1973, in those European concert halls, Keith Jarrett wasn't simply playing piano. He was conjuring something magical and unrepeatable - note by note - in that unique dialogue between artist and instrument that only the greatest improvisers truly understand. Today, fifty years later, ECM Records t…

Widely regarded as one of Pat Metheny's most inspired recordings and now considered a classic of instrumental and improvised music, *80/81* unveiled a bold new dimension of the then-26-year-old guitarist's sonic world. Released in 1980, this groundbreaking album marked Metheny's first collaboration with jazz luminaries from multiple generations, including bassist Charlie Haden, saxophonists Dewey Redman and Michael Brecker, and drummer Jack DeJohnette. Drawing equally from the freewheeling spiri…

Over the years, Pat Metheny Group's Grammy-winning double live album Travels has earned a singular reputation among jazz aficionados as one of the most distinctive and impeccably recorded live jazz albums of all time. Upon its initial release, it appeared on numerous year-end best-of lists, with The Wire hailing it as simply "remarkable" and "superbly recorded." The album captures the Pat Metheny Group during their 1982 US tour, a period when Brazilian percussionist Nana Vasconcelos had become a…

Following three studio albums (Stoa, 2006; Holon, 2008; and Lyria, 2010) plus a double live album (2012) with his electric band Ronin, Swiss pianist and composer Nik Bärtsch now unveils a new release with his original ensemble, Mobile – whose lineup partially overlaps with the current Ronin formation. Originally formed in 1997, Mobile (here enhanced on three tracks by a string quintet) represents the foundation of Bärtsch's ritualistic approach to music-making. This distinctive style has been sh…

Tip!  David Murray - Saxophone  Kahil El'Zabar - Percussion /  Kalimba /  Voice Recorded at the 10th OCT-LOFT International Jazz Festival, B10 Live, Shenzhen October 27th, 2023

"Recorded live at a UCLA concert hall in April 1978 and released on Warner Bros, Coltrane plays piano and organ accompanied by Roy Haynes on drums and Reggie Workman on bass. The trio conjures both a universe and a universal consciousness; Coltrane has no qualms with the commingling of exhilaration and asceticism it demands of listeners. In fact, she demands that you come closer, to its tone and to your natural self. What this feels like in one aspect is Black music's Bonnie and Clyde fantasy re…

Despite a 40-year age gap and the vast distance between Japan and Greece, pianist Masahiko Sato and guitarist Giotis Damianidis reveal themselves as kindred spirits on Thousand Leaves. Capturing their very first meeting—recorded live on February 2, 2024, at Jazz Spot Candy in Chiba, Japan—this album is a testament to the power of improvised music to dissolve boundaries of geography and generation. The rapport between Sato and Damianidis is so immediate and intuitive that one might imagine a much…

Drummer Joey Baron has played with such unorthodox types as John Zorn, Wayne Horvitz, and Tim Berne, so it's not surprising that his own sessions are equally diverse and ambitious. This date presents an unusual instrumental lineup and a freewheeling, constantly changing musical menu. Baron heads a trio with saxophone and trombone; the absence of bass, keyboards, or guitar results in intriguing voicings and the pieces are solely dependent on the interaction of his drumming with Ellery Eskelin’s s…

This is not a recording for the fainthearted, the straitlaced, or the stylistically correct. Bass trombonist David Taylor has assembled a multi-faceted self-portrait out of pieces he selected, inspired, and composed. His eclecticism demonstrates how meaningless the old stylistic boundaries are for a contemporary artist. Taylor is known for his work with such artists as Duke Ellington, Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, The Rolling Stones, and Quincy Jones. He also premiered compos…

It is a monumental task to interpret the music of Jimi Hendrix on the flute. The incredible flute virtuoso Robert Dick has managed to do it with ease, finesse, and soul. There is almost no sound that he cannot create on the flute with his amazing technique. Chords, slides, colors, drum and bass sounds, all had to be created acoustically. There are no electronically altered flute sounds on this recording.  This recording represents a statement that Robert Dick has long dreamed of making. Like man…

The spontaneous exploration of musical ideas can be exciting, rewarding, and challenging for both the performer and the audience; jazz musicians demonstrate this constantly. Most of the participants in this recording project have had extensive experience in jazz. In their work here, they are exploring the conceptual similarities and connections between improvised music and concert music, an extension and development of both European and American traditions. Each of the written compositions (Some…

Composer and pianist Bob Nell is best known for his work with Kelly Roberty and Brad Edwards, collectively known as The N/R/E Trio, with whom he performs regularly throughout the Midwest and Canada, backing such jazz luminaries as Eddie Harris, Ray Brown, Woody Shaw, Freddie Hubbard, David "Fathead" Newman, Bobby Hutcherson, Nat Adderley, Emily Remler, Michele Hendricks, Sonny Fortune, Hank Crawford, and many others. I first heard about Bob Nell shortly after moving to Seattle; he spent some tim…

It is with great satisfaction that we write these notes as the final part of a compositional saga, the evolution of which we could never have foreseen at its inception. This project was unusual for us in many ways, most notably in the length of time (4 1/2 years) during which we worked and reworked the material, and in the number of incarnations that resulted from these efforts. The development of the music was closely linked to a parallel evolution in music technology, particularly in digital s…

When it came time to prepare for this recording, I was intrigued by the possibilities of a quintet consisting of three winds, bass, and drums. My earlier projects had been either in the trio, quartet, or traditional jazz quintet format－now I wanted to write for a group that could play expressive chamber music, swing hard, and improvise on a high level. As envisioned, the compositions would combine inspiration from numerous sources to create something relevant to the present, reflecting today's c…

The New York Composers Orchestra is a big band formed in 1986 by its artistic directors Wayne Horvitz and Robin Holcomb with the idea of giving new life to a classic format and to further the tradition of new music bridging the worlds of notated and improvised music. “ ... the music evokes Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky as much as Count Basie and Charles Mingus; the playing is not just precise but committed to making the music jump.” —            －The New York Times

When time pulled the rug from under Earl Hines in 1983, he was still enjoying a comeback that had lasted almost twenty years. That comeback was one of the most important events in recent jazz history and the music included here was recorded when his return to action was in high gear. The classic quality that Hines maintained throughout his career, and that dominates these interpretations, was a persistent exuberance, a spirit of engagement. Hines was not incapable of meditative melancholy or the…

Jay McShann secured a lasting place in jazz history on April 30, 1941, when he became the first bandleader to usher Charlie Parker into a studio for a commercial recording session. For years, that was how McShann was remembered, if at all—as an early benefactor of the most influential figure in modern jazz. Shamefully, it took the jazz literati three decades to recognize Bird's old boss as a dynamic force himself. McShann's advocacy of Parker was hardly his only distinction as a bandleader. A ri…

The Texas Twister is a relaxed, gently probing session; its several highlights begin with the title selection, a thirty-two-bar riff confection with a characteristically willful opening solo by Buddy Tate. His best playing on the date is heard on "Talk of the Town," a memorable example of his ability to invest a ballad with emotional generosity, melodic invention, and playfully rhythmic finesse, and on "Topsy," in which he follows the piano solo with a plaintive, wailing, yet impeccably shaped s…

The fullness and clarity of the six solos and six duets that comprise Mostly Ballads set them apart from the typical encounter of post-Parker jazz musicians with "the tradition." Standard songs, once the improviser's training ground, fell out of favor in the sixties as jazz became freer on the one hand and more tolerant of rock on the other; far too many players viewed pop tunes merely as opportunities for broad comedy or rote displays of musicianship. But Steve Kuhn, a post-Parker improviser wi…

3 Phasis is the companion disc to the Cecil Taylor Unit, both set down over four miraculous days in April 1978. It too is a testament to the perfectionism and unpredictability that are hallmarks of Taylor’'s music. As always, he is the instigator and barometer of the torrents of energy channeled through his able and sympathetic collaborators. This is music of a fierce and uncompromising beauty which sweeps all before it.

The naive romanticism of the Jazz Age, when, as F. Scott Fitzgerald saw it, "people danced in a champagne haze on the rooftop of the world," was nowhere more clearly reflected than in America's popular music of the 1920s. The banal optimism, the desperate gaiety, the tinsel pretentiousness, the childish excitement, and the innocent beauty of the songs between the end of World War I and the Depression demonstrate how sweet and sad and silly a time it was. The subject matter of the love songs, the…

In this time of charged debate about immigration and the concomitant stereotyping of minorities, this collection of fourteen songs drawn from musicals and minstrel shows reminds us that the habit of stereotyping has been with us longer than we care to remember. Musical snapshots of prevailing attitudes towards certain minorities at the turn of the century, these songs are revealing in what they say about America then and now. Edward Harrigan's five songs about the Irish are affectionate, wistful…

From 1977, seven tunes, five of them by Ricky Ford, the then 23-year-old tenor saxophonist and member of the Charles Mingus band and leader of the session. Accompanied by bassist extraordinaire Richard Davis and the great Dannie Richmond, Ford leads the band through mostly hard-swinging, straight-ahead compositions steeped in the jazz tradition but speaking a contemporary language -- a result of the distinctly audible influence of Mingus. Great compositions and strong improvising from the solois…

This record presents further evidence of Cecil Taylor’s genius and awesome ability to work within the group context, in which he furthers his exploration of the piano “as catalyst feeding material to soloists in all registers.” This music at times gets very intense. It will take you down forgotten little streams in your mind and swell them with rivers of sound as Taylor pours notes on your ears. Listen. * * * "More than free, the music has a beguiling formal structure, and Taylor feeds all the e…

Keyboardist-composer Vijay Iyer’s energized sequence of ECM releases has garnered copious international praise. Yet his fifth for the label since 2014 – Far From Over, featuring his dynamically commanding sextet – finds Iyer reaching a new peak, furthering an artistry that led The Guardian to call him “one of the world’s most inventive new-generation jazz pianists” and The New Yorker to describe him as “extravagantly gifted… brilliantly eclectic. Far From Over features this sextet of virtuoso im…

Bordeaux Concert is a special document from Keith Jarrett’s last European tour. Each of Jarrett’s 2016 solo piano concerts had its own strikingly distinct character, and in Bordeaux the lyrical impulse is to the fore. In the course of this improvised suite, many quiet discoveries are made, and there is a touching freshness to the music as a whole, a feeling of intimate communication. Reviewing the July 2016 performance, the French press spoke of hints of the Köln Concert and Bremen-Lausanne in t…

2025 stock We’re very happy to announce that the record Elin Forkelid Plays For Trane is released on Sail Cabin Records on September 18, available on CD, 2 LP Vinyl (180g) and all major digital platforms. The record features Elin’s own personal take on the music of John Coltrane and features some of Sweden’s greatest jazz musicians. Elin Forkelid, saxophones / David Stackenäs, guitar / Mattias Ståhl, vibraphone / Ville Bromander, bass / Jon Fält, drums

*2025 stock* Pianist-composer Vijay Iyer follows his 2021 ECM disc Uneasy — the first to showcase his trio featuring bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey — with Compassion, another album in league with these two gifted partners. The New York Times captured the special qualities of this group, pointing to the trio’s flair for playing “with a lithe range of motion and resplendent clarity… while stoking a kind of writhing internal tension. Crucial to that balance is their ability to c…

Sail Cabin Records are very proud to release the new album from SOL SOL, titled “What Year Is It?”! It will be available on CD and digital platforms on January 28. (Vinyl edition will be released later this year.) SOL SOL is a Swedish jazz group featuring some of Sweden’s top jazz musicians, playing their highly original music, written by Elin Forkelid and David Stackenäs. This is their second album as a group. (Their first album “Unaccustomed Soil” was released 2019 on Signal and Sound Records.…

These tracks capture Ra's electronic peregrinations during the 1970s and '80s. The Arkestra occasionally makes a cameo appearance but Ra commands the spotlight, not so much composing music as painting soundscapes with electronic keyboards. In the collection we've titled Stray Voltage, Ra is not so much composing music as painting soundscapes with electronic keyboards. Ra doesn't simply play these consoles — he attacks, cajoles, and pounds them. He upends and transports them where they weren't bu…

2007 release ** Oversize cardboard sleeve.

2004 release ** "If you dig just a little deeper into experimental acoustic guitar music, the name Steffen Basho-Junghans should come up. A German-born guitarist and performer, Basho-Junghans stands out amongst others with his unique guitar style. Implementing elements of American folk with Indian raga for a unique sound, he has created a strong catalog that spans nearly 15 years. On 7Books, Basho-Junghans goes all out with a double-disc collection of extended tracks, in the range of ten to fift…

2008 release ** "For fans of Lounge Lizards this is a must-have, as we have two of the main musicians of this legendary band, tuba player Marcus Rojas and trumpeter Steven Bernstein. The line-up is completed by the excellent Danish drummer Kresten Osgood. The album begins with a moving howl from Marcus Rojas on the tuba, but this is just an introduction to Charles Brackeen's prayerful composition 'Prince of Night'. Then we have songs by the band members and Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, Hank W…

2014 release  ** "As if anything could be the same is a duet album by the father and son team of saxophonist Jack Wright and contrabassist Ben Wright . In the world of improvised music, or non-idiomatic improvised music if one must, Jack Wright is a seminal figure. A self-taught bluegrass and folk musician as a youth, and later a history professor at Temple University, Wright's trajectory out of "normal" life coincided with his burgeoning political activism during the early 1970s. His subsequent…

2016 release  ** "In pessimistic times of murky imminence, the alchemy of improvisation transmitting an explicit lucidity arrives as the proverbial unexpected gift. On a second thought, by analyzing Ute Völker and Udo Schindler’s curricula one does not anticipate anything less than that. Both proficient instrumentalists (on accordion and reeds, respectively), the former is a teacher and the latter an architect. The formal aspect of playing – and we don’t mean “academy”; rather, “respect of impli…

** Rare original copies. Original 1987 LP pressing on Mythic Sounds, numbered edition. Unplayed copies from a dead-stock, minor wear due to ageing on covers. Comes with original hype sticker ** A lost gem of modern jazz piano returns: New Piano Expressions is the singular, visionary statement from John Dennis, the Philadelphia pianist once hailed as the “Fat Genius” by his peers. Recorded in 1955 for Debut Records - the pioneering label founded by Charles Mingus and Max Roach - this album stands…

** Rare original copies, unplayed. Unofficial release and very rare to find. Minor wear due to ageing on covers ** In Concert captures Ornette Coleman at a thrilling crossroads, performing live in Padua with a quartet that brilliantly embodies his restless creative spirit. Alongside Coleman-who alternates between alto sax, trumpet, and violin-are James “Blood” Ulmer on guitar, Sirone (Norris Jones) on bass, and Billy Higgins on drums. This lineup, recorded in 1974, marks a period where Coleman w…

** Rare original copies. Early 80s LP reissue. Unplayed copies from a dead-stock, minor wear due to ageing on covers ** A seismic moment in the history of free jazz, Sonny’s Time Now stands as a raw, uncompromising manifesto of musical liberation. Recorded in New York City in November 1965 and released on the visionary Jihad label founded by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), this is the first album led by the revolutionary drummer Sonny Murray-and it’s nothing short of essential. With a lineup that re…

** Rare original copies. Original 1987 LP pressing on Mythic Sounds, numbered edition. Unplayed copies from a dead-stock, minor wear due to ageing on covers. Comes with original hype sticker ** A remarkable addition to the legacy of Charles Mingus, The Rarest On Debut – Mingus Newly Discovered unveils previously unknown studio sessions from September 1957 in New York City, now available in a strictly limited edition of 1,000 hand-numbered copies. This release is a treasure for collectors and jaz…